Trailer Park Trash

So I was thinking about trailers and how people go gaga goo goo over them, right? That’s fine and all, but a trailer is almost false advertising. Let’s break down a trailer:

– All the good parts of a film condensed into two minutes.

– Kinetic, energetic editing which enhances the action / appeal.

– Music is is probably not in the movie, and is really only a superficial addition to, again, enhance the bad-assness.

– Sensory overload.

That’s all well and good, but what does it mean? Well, it means that you are seeing all the cool action scenes for Terminator: Salvation, and not seeing the other 88 minutes of talking, plot, and character development. Now, I fo

r one, am all about plot and character development, but I’m pretty sure most people go into T:S for some robots being dun’ blowd up. So, the trailer makes it look like a non-stop thrill ride, and yet… It’s not.

Similarly, let’s take Strange Wilderness. The shark laughing is brilliance on celluloid. It’s featured heavily on the trailer. And yet, it’s 30 seconds of a 2 hour movie. The trailer promised a ton of nature show parodying, but what we REALLY get is a handful of out of place bits surrounded by a nonsensical, bizarre, unfunny story with shallow, terrible characters.

Maybe some would say that films are made to entertain. That’s fine, and even true, perhaps. Maybe I’m over-thinking. Maybe, I need to cool my jets. But chopping up the best parts and bad-ass-ifying them into a 2 minute concert of lights and sounds seem to kind of sell a product that you aren’t actually getting.